NABA brings the creative process behind fashion to the stage for its end-of-year fashion show In Milan, the show "Ricette" transforms the runway into a choral narrative blending music, video and artificial intelligence
Milan played host, in the spaces of the Sala Verdi at the Conservatorio, to the new edition of the Fashion Show organised by NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, dedicated to collections created by students of the Bachelor's Degree in Fashion Design at the Milan campus. The event, titled Ricette (Recipes), went beyond the boundaries of a traditional runway show to present itself as a multidisciplinary experience in which garments, live music, percussion and images generated with artificial intelligence tools were woven together into a single scenic narrative.
The evening's guiding thread was suggested by Nicoletta Morozzi, advisor for the Academy's Fashion Design area, who invited students to reflect not so much on the finished garment as on the process that leads to its creation. Just as a culinary recipe can be followed to the letter or reinvented with personal ingredients and intuitions, so too does a collection project grow from a combination of materials, technical skills, research and creative choices that accumulate over time. This approach pushed the show to foreground the design process, reflecting NABA's educational philosophy based on hands-on learning and continuous dialogue between the various disciplines offered by the Academy.
The collections presented on the runway were selected by a panel comprising industry journalists, industry professionals, company representatives and former students of the Academy. The production of the show also actively involved NABA's Media Design and New Technologies area, alongside the now well-established collaboration with the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Milano, giving rise to a staging capable of bringing different creative languages into dialogue.
One of the defining features of the 2026 edition was the event's international dimension, enriched by the participation of six collections by students from the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, a partner in an academic and cultural exchange programme that has been active with NABA for some time. These works opened the evening, introducing an intercultural perspective that broadened the show's overall narrative.
The evening also made room for costumes designed by Fashion Design students as part of the T4T – The Four Turandot project, a high-level artistic training initiative coordinated by the Milan Conservatorio and supported by European funds from the NextGenerationEU programme under the PNRR. The project was conceived to mark the centenary of the world premiere of Turandot, with the creation of costumes for the opera's principal characters, destined for four productions that will tour Italy, China, South Korea and the United States.
A key element in the event's success was also the musical component, curated by Conservatorio students under the direction of Maestro Paolo Pasqualin, who assembled a percussion ensemble structured across several sonic sections, with the participation of vibraphonist Andrea Dulbecco, a figure of international standing in his field. Alongside this was the live performance of "The Semi Dish Orchestra", a project conceived by NABA Director Guido Tattoni in collaboration with students from the Media Design area.
On the visual side, the show benefited from video contributions created by students of the Master's Degree in Creative Media Production, mentored by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, Creative Director of Karmachina and lecturer at the Academy. The projections, designed for the LED walls of the stage set, accompanied the runway presentations by offering an additional narrative layer built around the Ricette theme, through animations, footage and digital experiments produced in part with generative tools.
The event, part of the Academy's Public Program, confirms NABA's commitment to interdisciplinarity, bringing together education, experimentation and contemporary design languages. As is customary, the evening was broadcast live on the Academy's YouTube channel, with the support of partners including the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, Dr. Martens Italia, the BCM school and SATÌ Beauty.
Colomba Leddi, head of NABA's Fashion Design area, offered her reflections on the evening, highlighting how the new generation of creatives is building a vision of fashion grounded in care, material reuse and a sensitivity towards people and the environment — an outlook that is less rigid and more open to experimentation than in the past.
The collections presented were created by final-year students of the Bachelor's Degree in Fashion Design at the Milan campus: among them Andrea Airaghi, Giorgia Armano, Rocco Barana, Julie Bentsen, Fanney Bergsveindóttir, Sara Bosco, Tuvalie Bråmer Poskitt, Isabella Bungaro, Samuele Carrera, Evita Ciampolini, Laura Enrico, Hiba Errebbah, Giulia Fortin, Camilla Gambirasio, Luis Kaindlstorfer, Tara Kos, Mirko Lorena, Lorenzo Marcenaro, Stefan Ivanov Milev, Olivia Moriero, Camilla Mussolin, Viola Nigra, Mattia Ponzo, Emanuela Radaelli, Lucrezia Ronchi, Soley Runarsdottir, Annica Alice Christine Ryman, Giulia Sarrocco, Ludovica Travia and Vittoria Zambelli.
Coinciding with the show, as happens every year, the Academy's annual Magazine was also released, a publication born within the Fashion Styling and Communication strand of the Bachelor's Degree. This thirteenth edition was curated by Paolo Bazzani, Michele Corradini, journalist and lecturer Michela Gattermayer and stylist and lecturer Annie Lerner.
The event did not end with the Milan leg: on the first of July it moved to Rome, where the Fashion Design area gave rise to a new collaboration with the Visual Arts Department through the GROUNDS project, conceived to transform interdisciplinarity into a genuine creative method. The Rome initiative explored the relationship between permanence and transformation, bringing historical artistic practices into dialogue with new contemporary design languages.